A Forecast of Hope

A year  passes and 18 months go by and then it is nearly two years..
Spring blows in and with it some good news.
My youngest son has started school and my oldest son has a lovely new girlfriend and he is happy.
Before long they head overseas together for offshore adventures and thanks to the efficiency of the internet they send me photos by email and soon I join up with that new social media invention, Facebook so that I may follow their journies.
He looks happy in all the photos that I see and his handsomeness has returned, the lines of strain and sorrow have faded from his face and once again his eyes sparkle.
My little boys are happy to be reunited at school and catch the bus together willingly.
My middle son who is now nearly 15, ( he had turned 13 a couple days after Hori's death, the day after his burial to be exact) well, my dear boy wants to play the bass like his Uncle. He will be good too, he has a good voice, his uncle picked this up when he was about 5 years old.
In fact, I remember one of his birhtdays and Hori came around for his birthday and gave him a Batman cape set. "I thought I would save all your towels and table cloths, Sis and give him a real Batman outfit."
Such forethought.
So my boys are happy. Their happiness gives me hope and some how I think that it might be OK to move on -start to be happy, to look forward to my empty days.
Perhaps now I should fill them?
I see in my sons' faces that you can enjoy life and maybe even forget the former things but for me I
can only hope that one day I will forget that I no longer have my brother, that for the rest of my life I must live it without him there.
I wonder if that will be all right and I feel a different guilt now- a strange guilt for being a little bit happy. It's like my happiness is a sign that I am forgetting my brother's sad death and sudden exit from our lives.
But I remember him in a different way now. I imagine that he can see us all each day and that he takes great pleasure in seeing his nephews achieving fabulous things as they grow older.
My 7 year old has a drum kit and he is very good. I often feel sad that his Uncle is not here to jam with him and he would have so enjoyed playing with him and teaching him new songs and beats.
He would laugh at Isaac's mistakes, he would fit his guitar playing to save his little nephew's dignity.
He was like that Hori, all about protecting others and sheilding them from the slings and arrows.
I think some days that maybe he took to many hits for his loved ones and neglected his own back?
At times, all my sons play music together and it does sound beautiful and there is a sensitivity in all their hearts and playing that is quite moving.
So nearly two years later and I look at the stages of grief again and I still sometimes flounder in a pool of grief, anger, denial and anything negative. But some days I fell brave enough to give acceptance and moving forward a go.
I am not very good at it but I know with time I should succeed - however success is measured in these things.  I still can't see how I can say some sort of final goodbye, leave him dead and buried and forget about him and accept that he is no longer here and I must live my life without him.
I have stopped playing songs that Georgie used to play and now I play music that I think he would like to play or songs that I like to sing that remind me of him. So much of him dictates so much of my life each day.  I walk our dogs more than ever and I write about my awful grief, I wonder if that will ever stop.
This must all be releasing something from me but I don't quite know what yet.
But I do feel better and I can almost sleep through the night.
That dark spirit called grief that parked it's self in my room every night, waking me up and making me cry, has gone.  I connect with more friends through facebook and internet sites, I talk to them about my terrible loss until a burning swamp of desparing words starts to swallow me up again. It's like I need to crash into an iceberg to extinguish these burning wounds on my soul that blister and plague me from time to time. Listening to Christian preachers on Youtube soothes my soul. I can really relate to the shepherd boy in Psalm 23 when he sings, "He leads me beside still waters and makes me to lie down in green pastures." I sure can see those green pastures and feel the crisp, clean streams of water bubbling over my troubled head.
But I believe that I can now say those words, the very gold words that I had inscribed on Hori's gravestone, "All is well with my soul......"

I planted this rose shortly after Hori died.
It is called Compassion.

The Holes that Storms make

So nearly a year goes by and not much gets better.
Missing my brother and grieving for him is still a never-ending cycle.
The drinking has lessened and walking the dogs and writing has helped.
The crying and anger, bargaining and guilt continue, forgiving myself swings between being impossible or unnecessary, unattainable extremes that further damn me.
To begin with,  I visit my brother's grave every morning after dropping my sons off at school and kindergarten.
I take a cappucino and drink it with him, smoking ciggies, waving to people that I know as they drive past the cemetry on their way to their lives.
Me, I am stuck to this site, arm around the cross as I leave half drunk cappucinos and ciggies by the grave and sometimes I tease him about not being there to share the froth on my cappucino.
After a while the weather becomes so bad (it's winter) that I stop going everyday. Sometimes I sit outside the cemetry gates in my car and stare at his grave, apologising for not coming in to see him.
A couple of times I take his dogs, now my dogs, (our dogs?) up to see him but they are a bit rambunctous and I fear them breaking ornaments on other graves or maybe chasing rabbits and disappearing forever. Further loss is non-negotiable.
One day I drive out to the beach where he took his life and I park my car in the very spot that he died and I look out to sea. I try to get a sense of what he may have been thinking or seeing around him.
But of course, I can't possibly grasp his thoughts in those last moments before he left us.
I notice that you can see across the water to Taipa and I wonder if he looked over towards us and said goodbyes or sorry or something, sent invisible rays of love to us while we lay sleeping in our beds, completely unaware that our darling was getting ready to depart these shores, leave our lives and end his own.
The holes in our lives remain. They don't close over and heal like a deep cut on a wounded knee.
The broken pieces that lie around in our days are so broken and painful to handle that we just leave them lying there. We are refugess from a hurricane, sifting through debris and finding nothing of value, everything we loved has been swept away and are as untraceable as my brothers footprints.
Any memory carries a sharp ache with it now as we know that  our good times with George have ended. There will be no more songs played on Dad's guitar tonight, generous christmas gifts, lavish dinners filled with stomach heaving laughter, the boys no longer have their big, loving Uncle to go and stay with so that they can have all night video games sessions whilst eating expensive junk food.
My big brother, my protector has gone. He is never coming back - big hole.

A few months after his death, my mother and I attend his inquest. It is almost scary in it's severe formality. We are the only two people there.
It gives us no closure, answers no questions and still does not bring my brother back.
Some months later my mother and I set about chosing a head stone for his grave. It is traditional to have an unveiling one year after the death of a loved one.
We spend alot of time chosing the right stone, with a nice photo and a gold embossed picture of a guitar and a boxer dog. We carefully word the inscription and I add the words, "All is well with my soul".
This short line is from the Old Testament in the Bible. They are the words that the widow says to passerbys when she has discovered her dead son and she is rushing to find the prophet, Elisha as she believes he can help her. He comes to her house and her son is indeed raised from the dead.
Fantastic story. For us, however, there was not an earthly resurrection o fGeorge but only a  heavenly one for him.
He didn't want to stay on Earth because it had become far too harsh for him. There were broken pieces he couldn't put back together again with continuous storms eroding the fences in his mind, breaking down the soft walls of his heart and drowing his gentle soul.
He wanted to go "home" - he missed Dad and the thought of seeing him again in a safe and gentle place was a far better choice that tiptoing through his disintegrating life.
But that is only what I imagine. The coroner quietly tried to reassure us that he hadn't wanted to die, he just didn't want to live any more..the most peculiar oxymoron I have ever heard and yet, at the same time, I understood it.
Eventually the headstone was ready and Mum and I went with the nice lady from the funeral home to erect it on his grave. I helped her lift it out of the back of her ute and together we stood it up in the wet cement and centred it.` Mum stood by and watched and she didn't cry, I was really proud of her.
I didn't cry either.
We removed the linen covering from the headstone, as if it were the swaddling of a baby and there it was. His shining, new, black headstone complete with pictures, photo and beautiful gold lettering.
It really did look fantastic.
We hung around for a while, adjusting the headstone and I think Mum had flowers. I took a couple of photos and the funeral home lady took a photo of me and Mum with Hori's (George's) headstone.
The unveiling was complete and after a while we went home.
If some healing took place, I couldn't feel it and there was no noticeable closure.
That evening my husband and I returned to the gravesite to see the new headstone. We had a beer with Hori but I had no ciggies so didn't want to stay long plus it was very cold.
It was winter again, almost a year since he died, almost his first anniversay.
Nothing much had changed, the days ahead loomed like menacing trees in a spiteful, dark forest.
There were bound to be more holes as the weak and sagging ground of my life caved in a little bit more from the heavy sorrow of his loss.
As I left my brother's grave with it's shiny new headstone, it seemed the only hole we had been able to close was the very grave in which he now lay. The hole that we had  covered over with unforgiving earth, not so long ago, on a cold and damming day in June.

to be continued  .....

In the Aftermath of Grief

I was reading an article in a magazine that I don't normally read and there was one on the death of a loved one and it had the stages of grieving.

One of the points was bargaining. I don't remember seeing that one before but I guess I just don't remember, as really, who are you going to bargain with?

I know that God is the first obvious choice and after that who?

You can't bargain with someone who is dead. Silly.

I think possibly the person I was always trying to bargain with after my brother's suicide was myself and of course, him, though those conversations had to be imaginary.

I sometimes talked out loud to him or wrote him letters but really I knew he no longer had any bargaining chips, so to speak.

So in my bargaining I was always skipping around in the various stages of grieving though I just seemed to sob all the time, the stages didn't really seem to move much from there and I only seemed to have two or maybe three stages going on.

The other stage that kept flying in out of nowhere was anger but that was mostly directed at myself for failing my brother so badly. So of course I would have to cry again, try to bargain with him ( in my mind) and then get mad at myself all over again.

Then of course the denial, that had lots of sub categories like:

I couldn't believe he had killed himself.

He had left us.

He didn't want to stay.

He didn't care about us and he did all of the above.

I couldn't believe he didn't come and ask me for help and on and on the tape would play, click and start again and then I would start my combination of anger/crying and bargaining.

The standard rules of grieving weren't working for me so I made up some strategies of my own to help me cope with the "grieving steps" that weren't helping.

First, chain smoking because you can't cry when you are smoking.

Obsessively reading novel after novel so that you can't cry, think and especially bargain when engrossed in a good novel. You can also chain smoke at the same time.

In the evenings, drinking big unhealthy doses of alcohol to numb the pain and to slow your brain down so it won't think or bargain. 

This isn't a very good strategy to engage in and you are best to avoid it or keep it to once or maybe twice a week. You can cry uncontrollably and all the things you have been trying to avoid in your brain during the day may come out of your mouth in an incoherent rush.

You will possibly phone people and gabble and cry or email them - it is a bit worrying for those closest too you. Save them this added pain and burden. Please believe me on this one!

Eventually my oldest son moved home to "keep a bit of an eye on me", I think he meant both eyes.
He also felt that if he was in the family home, he could better grieve. In a cloud of smoke and tears, I welcomed him home.

So together we smoked and drank companionably, shared novels and daily we emptied the coffee plunger together and sang and listened to all the songs my brother used to play. 

Misery loves company and we became the best of mates,

We helped each other out of the holes and sometimes the quicksand, two are better than one so daily life  became a little, bit easier.

I even had someone to bargain with now!

Of course, evemtually, I had to move past my invented stages of grief too. It took some time and my son went back to his life and left me alone with  my novels, coffees, the ciggies and of course, my brothers two beautiful boxer dogs, Sabre and Bronx.

George's babies and my sole, living piece of my brother's life and the next stage of my grieving.

Every day and sometimes twice, I would take one of the "boys" walking. 

In the mornings I would walk my kids to the bus, wave them goodbye and then carrying on walking down the road. Whilst walking, I would "think" about things, do some more bargaining, sing a little bit and talk to the dog, oh and wave out to lots of people.

I became a regular fixture each morning on Oruru Road. I was walking out my frustrations, my sorrows, anger, doubts and the bargaining. It was as if the sweat was forcing all that darkness from the inner most depths of my being, even into the bone and marrow and perhaps even on a cellular level.

I did this walking for many, many months and it was during this time that I began to really, truly write and to write properly. I felt that the breaking of my heart had somehow released stored up, untapped talents and creative juice that I had never used or even knew existed.

I must also mention that my singing voice came back to me in this time too. My voice had been dormant since my self-conscious teenage years.

So the healing had begun, to steal a quote from that old sage, Van the Man Morrison.

                                      BRONX (foreground) and SABRE,  HORI'S BABIES.

Now, I can write with a light heart about this, the darkest and saddest time of my life.

I can remember back to how every day I would wake up and lie very still, trying to get a sense of the world around but grief was always sitting on the edge of the bed beside me, ready to pounce and engulf me with another day of torment.

During the night my reservoir of tears had filled up so that I had to leap out of bed and rush to the coffee pot, rolling up a few ciggies so I would be armed for the day before I was drowned in sorrow.

But every morning before I fled the non existent safety of my nice, warm bed, I would pray earnestly to God and this was my prayer: "Well God, I still feel like crap, I am still sad, I don't feel any different but I know, I really know that I won't always feel like this and you are helping me, even if I can't feel anything. I know there is a light at the end of the tunnel and even though I can't see it, I will one day and one day, I will be better again and I will be happy because I know YOU always make everything better again."

I would then sit on my back step with Bronx and Sabre who were now, "my dogs" and we would cuddle together while I smoked and gulped coffee, looking up at the morning sky and hoping for something, something maybe even something a little better as my tears began falling at the start of another new day.

to be continued.........

The Storms that Kill

I am feeling quite inspired by storms at the moment, I think there could be more coming but we will see. Today I don't want to talk about wind and rain storms but life storms. The ones that bruise and batter the walls of our mind, damage the roofs of our hearts and sometimes take life.                                       One still grey, June afternoon in 2006, I received the news of my brother's sudden death amd it was suicide. It was the beginning of a fierce, torrential storm that smashed suddenly through our lives.
The devastation and damage took years to repair and some things were never recovered or mended.
Of course, his very life was irretrievable.
I know that I am not the only person has been smashed by a tsunami of grief. One minute you are lying on the couch reading a good novel, eating popcorn whilst your kids watch cartoons and then you hear the dogs barking and when you look out the kitchen window there is a police truck parked in your driveway. Your heart stops then races and you wonder what they can want with you though thinking back, at the time I knew that it was something to do with my brother. But of course the news they delivered was unimaginable.
Just like in the movies you take a big breath and you hear a strange rushing of. is it wind or water or the invisible approach of terror and then you can't get that breathe back out as the shock has stunned you so badly and nothing moves anymore -so you scream to start yourself breathing again. But now your heart has begun to beat at such a dangerous rate you have to keep screaming to supply your blood with oxygen. You either have to scream or faint in these moments. I screamed.
I feared fainting in case I never woke up again.
Through weeping eyes, in your mind you see the lives of your closest, dearest family members breaking cracking, tears mixed with the blood of shattered hearts and you think that you might just die yourself if you can't stop this flood of pain that has flattened you and is on course to swallow up the rest of your family.
You walk back into your home and your dogs have run inside and have eaten your popcorn and are now lying on the couch on top of your novel. These things don't matter any more and it will be some time before they do again.
So now our lives are blown to pieces, like the remnants of a fallen lego castle,a field of sharp fragments and every piece hurts to handle and there are bits missing or so badly smashed that they can no longer be used. There are lots of holes in our lives now especially where my brother once was - this is a hole made of quick sand, get too close and you slide back into the darkest pit of sorrow and fear.
It is endless and time is taking too long to heal.
Like refugees from a hurricane, we walk around look for something beautiful to give our day meaning - something new and precious to give us hope.
Death is often quick and tragedy strikes with a frightening velocity.
Grief is exhausting and constantly gets in the way of survival.
The light at the end of the tunnel keeps going out and still life goes on and we do too just not so quickly. Our steps are small and tender, testing out a new and unknown ground.
A life with holes and a patch of quicksand that wasn't there before.

A COUPLE OF MY BROTHERS GUITARS - THE ONE ON THE STAND IS A GIBSON.

     to be continued .......